PEACEMAKING THROUGH NONVIOLENCE*

Michael N. Nagler

It is blasphemy to say that non-violence can be practised
by individuals and never by nations which are composed of individuals.M.K. Gandhi

The philosophy and strategy of nonviolence [must] become immediately
a subject for study and serious experimentation in every field of human
conflict, by no means excluding relations between nations.Martin Luther King, Jr.

Somalia, Rwanda and what was once Yugoslavia reveal the shocking inadequacies
of the 'security regime' of our post-cold-war world. One response to these
disasters has been to field more UN Peacekeeping operations; more operations
were mounted in the four years between 1988-1992 than the previous forty.
Yet, as we all know, this development was far from adequate, and in the
end has brought the whole idea of UN peacekeeping into question. NATO head
John Shalikashvili said early in 1992, "the days of pristine peacekeeping
as we have understood it for years are probably over" (Shalikashvili, 1993).
His solution was a combined NATO-former Warsaw Pact global police force.

Many argue that instead the time has come for an entirely different
kind of peacekeeping, based on nonviolence. This is utterly different
in kind from classical, armed peacekeeping interventions, no matter who
organizes them. Armed peacekeeping, however well-intentioned, tries to
use the means of ordinary conflict for the goal of peace.
Nonviolent peacekeeping, however, tries to make peace with peaceful means;
and that makes all the difference. One of the cardinal principles of nonviolence
is, in Gandhi's words, "means are ends in the making." From this point
of view the breakdown of UN peacekeeping was predictable, given the inherent
contradiction of the concept. Given this contradiction, moreover, while
classical peacekeeping can reduce a conflict (when it works), it cannot
lead to longterm peace.

The 'Two Force' Theory

Nonviolent peacemaking is carried out by people committed to positive,
constructive means of resolving conflict and beyond that of reconciliation,
not only without the use of weapons but in an ideal sense without reliance
on coercion of any kind. Having renounced the sanction of harmful force,
they are nonetheless far from powerless; this was explained almost a century
ago in a famous declaration by Mahatma Gandhi:

Of power there are two kinds. One is obtained by threats of punishment.
The other arises from acts of love.

'Love' is not meant here in the sentimental sense, of course, but is
meant to identify a perfectly practical but largely ignored fact of political
life which Kenneth Boulding called "integrative power" (Boulding, 1989).
When Quakers broke the food blockade on Germany and Austria after World
War One they were not motivated by emotional love toward individual Germans
but by a higher sense of what makes politics work. And in fact, they seem
to have been correct. Thirty years later Quaker relief groups, and they
only, were allowed to succor, even rescue Jews inside Germany, even at
the height of the war. Because they did not use threats of punishment (which
we might call Force One) but what Gandhi referred to as 'acts of love'
(Force Two) they made an impression on the mindset even of severely dehumanized
people--an effect which, had it been understood and built on early enough,
might just have made World War Two avoidable.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that most formal, institutionalized
conflict management mechanisms we rely on today, especially on the international
scale, are based on Force One, the compelling power of threat--even by
those institutions attempting to make peace. It is time, quite simply,
to learn how we can make peace through systematic, institutional use of
this new power. They are, to repeat, entirely different animals: to limit
the force unleashed by fear is good, it is devoutly to be wished, but it
is not to be confused with enabling the force that could be engaged by
empathy. Most security debates emphasize the auspices of power--should
it be national, transnational or global? -- while ignoring the much more
important question, what kind of power we are talking about. In
terms of longterm, practical results different kinds of power can lead
to opposite results. This is one of the most important distinctions to
recognize in peace research -- and life in general.

As an example, from the moment Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait public
debate centered on the respective merits of a military attack or economic
sanctions. From the Gandhian point of view, however, such sanctions are
a form of attack; a milder form, quite possibly in some situations a correct
form, but one that is not different in kind from the force that
sends planes over the air space of another state. In fact, we now know
how many innocent children suffered and died, and continue suffering and
dying, as a result of this 'alternative' to violence. 'Shall we use force
or sanctions?' was a false dichotomy -- pulled punches are not the same
as outstretched hands.

Sanctions or military interposition are the two options mentioned in
Section VII of the UN Charter, containing the original mandate for UN peacekeeping.
Yet even as both the general public and policymakers were debating this
false polarity, a small ad-hoc group of international volunteers were doing
something entirely different: they camped themselves on the Iraq-Saudi
border, as an act of what we now call nonviolent interposition.

In the event, they were evacuated to Baghdad by Iraqi civilians fifteen
days into the bombing, whence most of them removed some days later to Amman.
Lest we think that this constitutes a poor argument for the effectiveness
of such interventions, consider that this group was almost totally untrained
(their strategy, for example, was rather poorly suited to what was obviously
going to be an aerial attack), isolated, in fact virtually ignored in terms
of public support, invisible to the world at large and easily ignored by
the relevant policymakers (as a State Department official posted in the
Middle East at the time later told me, they were "completely irrelevant").
Yet, while the 'allies' were reorganizing threat power and calling it--cynically,
in my view--a "new world order," these volunteers did something more deserving
of that exalted term. By providing a nonaligned peaceful presence, they
remained outside the classical 'polarity' which is really two positions
on the same spectrum; while they were at it they organized relief work
in Amman, helped counter media distortions back home, and learned a lot.
In the words of one participant, the experience "bolstered my belief in
the potential impact of practitioners of nonviolence." And they were not
entirely alone.

Spontaneous interpositions in conflicts have been used to stop conflicts
since the dawn of civilization (the Buddha is said to have stopped a war
this way in the sixth century BCE). However the idea of institutionalizing
such a technique, of preparing for it ahead of time along more or less
parallel but opposite lines to the way states prepare for war, goes back,
as do so many innovations in the field, of peace to Mahatma Gandhi, who
began referring to his volunteers as an 'army of peace' (shanti sena)
almost as soon as he saw the effectiveness of nonviolence at first hand
in South Africa in 1913. Then in the twenties, back in India, he came out
with detailed ideas for regional or neighborhood peace armies and continued
to develop the concept until the end of his life. Nothing ever persuaded
him that they would not work on a grand scale; in one of his boldest and
most misunderstood proposals he advocated that India respond with nonviolent
peace brigades to the anticipated Japanese invasion during WWII. He was
still advocating some version of organized nonviolent peacekeeping after
Independence, for example during the Kashmir dispute, and as Weber points
out he was to have left for a meeting to establish the Shanti Sena a few
days after his assassination on January 30, 1948 (Weber, 1996, p. 69).

The Mahatma was not given a chance to test this method in large-scale
conflicts himself, being imprisoned by the British and unsupported by his
own party members during most of this period and on this issue; but by
far the most dramatic shanti sena the world has so far seen was organized
in the thirties in what was then the Northwest Frontier Province of India
by the Mahatma's close disciple Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan among the notoriously
warlike Pathans whose descendents later would frustrate the overwhelmingly
superior force of the Soviet Union by more traditional methods. Nearly
100,000 Pathan warriors--all devout Muslims, by the way--vowed to resist
the British without weapons in their hands or violence in their hearts,
and kept their vow under unbelievable provocation, adding immeasurably
to the freedom struggle by their unsung efforts (Easwaran, 1984; Weber,
1996, pp. 44, 150).

After Gandhi, the idea of nonviolent peacekeeping remained alive in
India where a formal Shanti Sena was set up under the leadership of Vinoba
Bhave in 1957-- and spread round the world.

The 1980's were an important decade for the development of peace teams.
During this period a number of INGO's, the largest of which were the religious-based
Witness for Peace and the nominally secular Peace Brigades International,
saw action in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Sri Lanka and less remote
regions, like Quebec (PBI). The Gulf War and the carnage which brought
thousands of volunteers to former Yugoslavia, moreover, led to more ad
hoc operations. On the other extreme, a series of international consultations
has been held to bring about a global coordinating body to recruit, train
and field nonviolent peace teams, as well as what the Quakers call 'interpretation':
to alert and explain the significance of what is happening to the general
public. As with Civilian Based Defense, the cousin of nonviolent intervention,
a government or two is flirting with the idea of a nonviolent peacekeeping/peacemaking
service alongside conventional defenses.

They have good reason. In a nonviolent spirit, small numbers of people
have gone into extremely dangerous areas and sometimes accomplished significant
reductions in conflict with almost no personal casualties. Three PBI workers
were stabbed in Guatemala and many have received death threats, but the
fact is that since the death of one Hugh Bingham in Palestine in 1938 (Weber,
1996, p. 201) only one person, to my knowledge, has been killed while attempting
to intervene in an active conflict without the 'protection' of arms, not
to mention less dangerous peacekeeping situations. Needless to say, conflict
deescalation and nonviolence slip quite through the net of
modern news media; on my own campus a tiny group called Students for Peace
prevented an ugly battle between radical students and the ROTC in the 1970's,
creating space for constructive dialogue, but neither this nor a much larger
incident at the University of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution became
'news.' What unarmed volunteers can accomplish is something we have to
extrapolate from the few cases that are known: the FOR team that attempted
to contact General Sandino in the jungles of Nicaragua in 1926, the Shanti
Sena brigade that resettled refugees on Cyprus or negotiated a settlement
to the longstanding Nagaland succession conflict in Northern India, and
the civilizns who stopped a civil war, namely in Algiers in 1962 (Keyes,
1982, p. 18). All this has been done, as the yet-to-be-published study
of Yeshua Mosher points out, with a "chronic lack of resources, . . . inadequate
infrastructure, poor communications, and limited training opportunities,"
not to mention the near-total cold-shoulder from the mass media and --
a critical shortcoming--"little popular understanding of the dynamics and
history of this manifestation of nonviolent action." The historical record,
then, has traces of very small, private, underfunded efforts which accomplished
remarkable successes with intercommunal, intranational, and even international
conflicts.

In Sri Lanka, Guatemala and Haiti workers with PBI and other groups
provided a shield of little more than their presence that not only protected
individuals who would certainly have been killed but made it possible for
forces of peace and justice to consolidate and expand--the first thing
repressive regimes try to prevent. And they have done remarkably well at
protecting local communities. When Ernesto Cardenal was Minister of Culture
in the Sandinista government, I had occasion to ask him during a visit
to Berkeley whether he thought the faith-based groups operating in his
country were helping. Cardenal, himself far from dedicated to nonviolence,
told me with considerable passion that "We need more of these groups and
we need them quickly. Wherever they have been there has been no violence."
Later his translator repeated that statement for the gathering, but unconsciously
'cleaned it up,' saying "there has been almost no violence." Furious
at this distortion (with which all nonviolence advocates are familiar),
Cardenal practically pounded the table: "I said absolutely no violence.

Nonviolent peacemaking is an idea whose time has come; but it is no
longer just an idea. It is an idea with a track record.

Where Do We Go from Here?

The UN is in a sense the ideal place to begin building a world peace
guard (as one such international effort was called). Its modest resources,
and public vixibility, are vastly greater than those of all the world's
volunteer peace team organizations past and present put together. What's
more, the UN has experienced at first hand the frustration of attempting
to make peace by weapons. But up to now, the world's premier peacemaking
body has feared to tread into this area of making peace with peaceful means.
Vinoba Bhave offered to recruit a peace army of 50,000 volunteers for service
in the Bangladesh war, but the UN was not in a position to take him up
on it, on this or subsequent occasions. Since those days, however, things
have improved slightly. PBI has been given NGO status by the international
body, and one agency of its own, UN Volunteers, has been working with a
leading volunteer organization, Peaceworkers, to identify and train nonviolent
personnel to help their teams in Burundi or the Caucasus. But the UN is
as yet far from organizing and conducting unarmed, nonviolent peacemaking
and peacekeeping operations based on the experience of nongovernmental
agencies in this dramatically different activity. Nor have the member states
begun to ask for it.

History contains few examples of large bureaucracies making bold leaps
of imagination, and the fact is that the similarities between classical
UN peacekeeping and any form of shanti sena activity based on active nonviolence
is superficial. In the meantime, brave men and women are going to go into
intense conflict situations to make peace, if necessary by interposing
themselves between hostile forces, whether or not the UN or an independent
global body comes forward to support them. Therefore many activists now
feel that the best strategy is to proceed on their own, encouraging but
not necessarily expecting the UN to adopt their discoveries.

If I were the Secretary General, I would scrap classical peacekeeping
tomorrow, giving all UN soldiers the option of being retrained for nonviolent
peacekeeping and peacemaking. In the real world, however, what I recommend
is transarmament; to phase in some nonviolent peacemaking operations
and phase out armed peacekeeping progressively as the former prove their
effectiveness. One precaution in necessary for this scenario to work: nonviolence
is incredibly robust in the face of external resistance--it is amazing
how much punishment and threat a person inspired by principles can face--but
it is very sensitive to internal contradiction. Armed peacekeeping, however
desireable in comparison to known alternatives, is a contradiction. You
cannot really mix Force Two with Force One, by trying to employ classical
and nonviolent peacekeeping in the same operation. When, in December,
1992, international volunteers got to Sarajevo, the UN protection force
(UNPROFOR) offered to escort them through 'sniper's alley' in a column
between tanks. The volunteers had cooperated with UNPROFOR in various ways,
but declined this protection. I feel that they did exactly the right thing
by drawing that line (and incidentally they suffered no casualties at all).

I see four tasks ahead to develop nonviolent intervention as a global
force:

1. Identify the people who know how peace armies work, experientially
or theoretically. They could be brought together for a conference, say
at the UN University in Costa Rica or a suitable progressive peace institution
like the University of HI, Manoa or Meiji Gakuin. The task of such a conference
would be to identify the needs that must be met to develop and institutionalize
nonviolent peacemaking.

2. Recruit, organize and train volunteers. All recruitment must be individual
and voluntary. Military training does not attract the same people or bring
out of them the same human potential as those enjoy who go into a situation
with empathy and courage as their only protection. So the two crucial differences
between what we might call classical peacekeeping and nonviolent peacekeeping
are, first that nonviolent peacekeepers are unarmed and second that they
want to be. This, to paraphrase Gandhiji again, makes all the difference.
It implies a different kind of human relationship and creates an entirely
different climate of possibility.

As suggested already, not only are military peacekeeping operations
in many respects a useful model, they could very often involve the same
people. Courage is courage--you just have to learn to point it in a different
direction. Ordinary combat veterans, too, are an already partly trained
manpower pool; there is a lot of misplaced idealism there to be tapped.
However, it must be admitted that how to train people for nonviolence
is not widely understood. Gandhi had the advantage of being able to train
lifelong volunteers in special communities, with about fifteen years in
between major campaigns. Much more has to be learned about how he did this.

3. Select an intervention, and go to work. At the moment small bands
of volunteers are rushing off to help wherever they feel most pain, but
it would benefit history much more in the long run if they would pull together
and concentrate on one place where disaster can be decisively halted.

4. Tell the world. An important and vastly overlooked corollary to peacemaking
operations themselves is educating the general public. UNESCO, with its
Culture of Peace project, could take on the historic task of documenting
and explaining how nonviolence peacebuilding has worked and how it should
be further developed. It is the UNESCO Charter, after all, that says war
begins in the 'minds of men;' UNESCO could directly undertake education
that can give men and women another mindset -- a different culture. But
even without such backing, there is a huge job of work to do, which could
begin in a major success such as I fully believe could happen. Virtually
the entire history of peace brigades has been ignored, from the beginnings
in the mind of the master, Gandhiji, to the abortive idealism of Maude
Royden down to the qualified successes of Witness for Peace, Christian
Peacemaker Teams, PBI, Peacemakers, and many others. At the time of this
writing a superb history of Shanti Sena and peace teams, rich with lessons
for the future, has appeared (Weber, 1996) and two more promissing books
are in the wings. It is not clear how much the general public, still utterly
ignorant of what peace teams are and how they work, will be affected by
these books. It's not clear how you remake a culture, but it's clear we
have to try.

Conclusion

It may be useful to point out four major advantages of nonviolent peackeeping,
though this may already be obvious to some of us.

Cost. Classical peacekeeping is cheaper than war, but nonviolent
peacekeeping is cheaper still. You get much more non-bang for the buck.
It requires even less equipment, it is done by idealistic volunteers who
love their work, and it is remarkably efficient. The volunteers in Nicaragua
in 1983 who apparently pacified Jalapa, a war zone on the Honduran border,
for as long as they remained, constituted a 'brigade' of ten people.

Political viability. UN peacekeeping has been hampered by the
understandable fear of a standing army that would look like a world police
force (not to mention an excuse for some Security Council nations' power
plays). Most people and states would have no such problem with a standing
peace army. The prospect of being invaded by well-intentioned and
highly skilled peacemakers, mostly young idealistic people, is terrifying
only to tyrants, and then only if they understand the power it entails.

Effectiveness. Marrack Goulding, recently called the world's
peacekeeper-in-chief, has rightly said, "The United Nations can cajole,
argue, bluster . . . but it cannot compel" (Economist 1992, p. 57).
Nonviolent peacekeeping would turn this weakness into its greatest strength.
Nonviolence is that form of power specifically designed to operate in situations
where you cannot--or rather, do not wish to compel. Persuasion, not coercion
is the modality of the Second Force.

Classical peacekeeping has prevented or limited some conflicts, but
it has not, and cannot change the direction of international relations.
It cannot do this because it relies, ultimately, on the same force peaceless
interactions exploit, albeit attempting to apply them to another purpose.
But nonviolent peacemaking suffers from no such handicap. There would be
some false starts, some errors and some casualties, but once it became
clear that there is a way to make peace without the sanction of force (i.e.,
Force One) the world would have found a new direction towards enduring
peace.

Peace research has taught us never to underestimate the effectiveness
of right means coupled with right ends. What Alain Richard of PBI has referred
to as the 'contagion' of peace that often allowed his team to win over
intransigent opposition and prevail over seemingly impossible odds is confined
to a small scale only because we have not mounted it on a larger one.

There are questions within the peace movement itself about nonviolent
intervention; not that it's too dangerous -- most peace activists have
seen through that delusion -- but that interference may not be the right
thing to do. For reasons I hope to elaborate elsewhere, I am among those
who feel that in an extreme emergency, when a Burundi or an Afghanistan
is blowing up, you have to use whatever nonviolent power is available.
The alternative is to do nothing or bring in miltary force. During a MacNeil-Lehrer
Newshour just before Christmas an American Catholic nun, discussing our
intervention in Somalia said, "In a season when we long so for peace and
to comfort the afflicted . . . wouldn't it be wonderful if we had at the
same time a force that provided agrarian help, economic help? Why not have
grandmothers along to hold the abandoned, orphaned children? . . . We don't
plan for peace, and we don't have a program for peace. We only have a program
for war."